Scott Giles is a composer, instrumentalist and conductor. He has been composing since 1979.
"Music should be as difficult as it needs to be," he says of his compositional process. "It shouldn't be any tougher or simpler than it has to be. That's why the easiest music I've written doesn't sound any more easy than the stuff that requires the height of virtuosity."
He explains, "I start with a musical idea and follow it through its inevitable and logical conclusion. Its like Chaos Theory and sensitivity to initial conditions. I have an idea of the orchestration and maybe a sense of the dramatic moments I want to hit upon, then I put the first ideas down. After the first few bars I start following the logic of the music and it almost writes itself with just a nudge here and there from me."
His aesthetic is eclectic, incorporating techniques that are as familiar as film music or as abstract as advanced math. "I use whatever I have to. It all depends on the music and its needs. It is not so much me saying 'I think I'll write a non-tonal piece,' as much as following what Copland called 'The Long Line.' If you're writing music it is always musical things that determine your action. Anything else results in self-conscious stuff."
